Do you know a good article about the open source politics and economy?

Sometimes the big companies themselves release open source because they have some benefits.
Then they sell support, advices ...

My question is what is the real economy about open software?
No professional will work for nothing. This software are couple of classes but thousand or may be millions of classes. If you are really a pro you will write software for money, because you have life, wife, kids, taxes, you must earn.
Please do not tell me that they are doing this for pleasure or hobby!

Some people write free/open source software because it's something they personally want. Some do it as part of a reputation game, similar to academia. Some people get paid for it.

Companies pay for it because they make money off it somehow. O'Reilly Books makes money by selling books on using free software. Red Hat makes money by providing enterprise-quality support. Apple makes money by adapting it to their needs and selling computers using it. I think IBM is working on Linux so they can slowly move away from AIX. Some companies find it more economical to develop free software in conjunction with other companies, so everybody can use it and nobody has to pay too much.

Companies that make their money selling software, like Microsoft, will generally avoid free software. Companies that make their money on something related to software will want the software as cheap as possible, preferably free. In some cases, this means software the customers use, and in some cases this means software for internal use.

"Companies that make their money selling software, like Microsoft, will generally avoid free software. " Almoste voted you up. Microsoft does more in the OpenSource area than a lot of people think. Most of the OpenSource software is written by big companys like IBM, Google, Microsoft, HP etc. If they would not take this effort of investing Billions each year OpenSource would still be no-where.
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Yves M.Aug 25 '10 at 8:48

On Stack Overflow, we get a lot of good quality answers (and questions).

But somebody needs to write the answers. How are they paid? Surely no professional would spend time hanging out here and answering questions for nothing.

...

This, of course, is not how it works: people get pleasure from contributing to something, from testing and extending their knowledge, from being part of a community. Thus they write for SO in their spare time, and enjoy doing so.

Most of what I've done on FOSS projects has been unpaid, either building a tool or some functionality that I need at the time - "scratching my own itch", as ESR puts it. This doesn't mean that it doesn't make me money. As a freelancer, the tool I build/improve today could help me land a project tomorrow or help me get an existing project done more quickly, either of which is good for my bank account.

Back when I was working as someone else's employee, there were also times when I developed code on the clock that would help with my job, or other employees' jobs, but my employer wasn't in the business of selling software anyhow, so they were willing to let me release it under a FOSS license.

Today, I offer clients a discount on work done for them which will be released under a FOSS license, in which case I would be getting paid directly for work on FOSS code. Nobody's actually taken me up on it yet, but a current client has asked whether certain parts of their project would be suitable for open sourcing, so they're clearly open to such arrangements and looking for an opportunity to get that discount.

Edited to add: Freelancing has not been kind to me in the six months since I originally posted this answer (too hard to find paying clients for my language of choice), so I have accepted a full-time job with the local university's library, where I will be helping to clean up their in-house collection management application so that it can be released under a FOSS license sometime next year.

So, yes, there are jobs out there where writing FOSS is the primary job responsibility. I suspect that they're mostly in the public sector or at educational institutions, but there are also some private corporations (like, say, Red Hat) where such jobs can be found.

When you say "professional", by definition you are establishing the value and compensation context of your question/statement. But software is not just created as an outcome of the fruits of a profession. Software is art. Some writers have to write, some painters have to paint. Coders need to code. We all acknowledge that it would be nice to be paid for doing what we are. Some are better at it than others is all.

Yes you are right. There are huge corporations behind this projects. But if you like to pay the employees you need to sell the product that the employees produce. Mysql is free. How do they make the profit?
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darpetApr 24 '10 at 9:39

Remember there are other profitable actions for huge corporations like: marketing, general awareness, displacing competitors and so on. :-) And then you also have pure projects where developers spend their spare time just for fun and to make a better world, but the big ones are usually not like that. And then, I don't know how is MySql being charged now that it's part of Oracle, but before companies would pay for "certified versions" and 24x7 support. At the end you pay the same price most of the time, but there's a different concept on the invoice.
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pabloApr 24 '10 at 9:55

Some open source software is useful enough that a company that would benefit from the software being better will "donate" developers to work on it. For example, RedHat - who markets a paid version of linux - may pay for developers to improve certain parts of GNU Linux.

Some open source software has paid support, or paid consultants. So, MySQL was free, but also offered professional consulting based around the software they were already experts on.

But most open source work? Unpaid. Normally, it's a great thing to put on a resume to get you a paying gig.

@Roger: I agree that 95% is a low estimate of the number of projects done with no backing, but 60% is also probably a reasonable estimate of the amount of development done by people paid for it. The Linux kernel and My Open Game That Will Be Abandoned Next Week And Never Released are only one project each, but Linux represents a lot more development effort. Given that the vast majority of software projects (FOSS or not) are abandoned before completion or never seen significant usage after completion, the two numbers aren't contradictory at all.
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Dave SherohmanApr 24 '10 at 10:54

Wouldn't it be likely that most Open-Source developers do the actual developing in their spare time and work somewhere during the day?
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KdgDevApr 24 '10 at 11:06

1

@WebDevHobo: Probably the most by number of developers, by a large margin. However, a lot of contributions come from companies that pay their developers to produce OS software, and I'd generally expect people who work full-time on a project to be more productive than people working in their spare time. It's a mixture.
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David ThornleyApr 27 '10 at 19:28

My gut tells me this is the norm, namely that the open source culture is significantly supported by grants and government subsides. For example, I was just reading that student loans outstanding ticked over a trillion dollars in 2012. The majority of student loan dollars are government dollars. I don't know how much open source originates in academia, but I suspect it is a high percentage. Anyone have numbers on this?
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lone_wolf_codingAug 5 '12 at 1:34